6 Things We Wouldn't Have If Not For Chuck Barris

The world has lost one of its most exuberant weirdos. Chuck Barris, producer of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, creator and host of The Gong Show, and also maybe undercover CIA assassin (but probably not, but maybe) died yesterday at age 87. To some, he may seem like a footnote, a charming but insignificant oddball, but those of us who were there know the truth: Chuck Barris was a legend. With enthusiasm, vision, and the somehow permanently wet mouth of Burt Young in Rocky, Barris changed the face of television forever. Here are a few things we would never have if he hadn't shuffled onto our TV screens.

Luxurious Lowbrow Entertainment

The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game were trash, and they knew it, and they didn't care if you did too. They belonged on your hometown's UHF station just before the dinner hour. They featured regular people talking proudly of making whoopee. They appealed to the lowest common denominator, which somehow nobody had thought to do yet. They made Barris a millionaire, and they led us all to The Gong Show, which went and changed the whole game.

True Unpredictability

My brothers and I were strongly discouraged from watching The Gong Show. Not because it ever really slipped into vulgarity, but because it was strange. Our parents were never quite sure what it was. Well, the joke was on them because neither was Chuck Barris. When he threw to a commercial, he would always say, "We'll be right back with more…stuff, right after this," and the word was loaded. It meant that in the next act, you could see a flawless rendition of "Nessun Dorma" from a trained opera singer, or you could see a child singing Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were" in Pig Latin. You would probably see both. But most often, you'd see things like this:

It felt like a show thrown together in a half-hour in your weirdest uncle's VFW Hall, and if it freaked the squares out, all the better.

Exquisite Ugliness

Televised talent shows up until The Gong Show had been celebrations of beauty and promise. Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. The Miss America Pageant. You might get occasional camp by way of Queen For A Day, in which women would out-woe one another for the chance to win a refrigerator. (No, really.) But as The Ramones and John Waters did at the same time on the other side of the country, Chuck Barris focused his eye on the beauty and tragedy of the ordinary. On The Gong Show (and on its troubled stepsister The $1.98 Beauty Show), regular people would put their best foot forward, and it would be weird, and it would be up to us to speculate as to whether they were in on their own jokes.

Brutal Honesty

Before The Gong Show, talent show judges had to at least pretend to be kind. And they would have no reason not to be, as the real screwballs and tragic dreamers would have been weeded out by the producers and casting directors. But Chuck Barris created a world in which a person could hit center stage, give their absolute all, and be banished back to wherever they came from by Jamie Farr or Pearl Bailey. The Gong Show paved the way for Simon Cowell's sour kiss-offs and Anne Robinson's terse "You are the weakest link…g'bye," yet they somehow never seemed cruel. Acts would be gonged with mercy, and sent home with a tub of Turtle Wax. It all seems so genteel in retrospect.

Rip Taylor

Only in Chuck Barris' twisted ecosystem could a gaudy, confetti-throwing Rip Taylor have flourished. Like today's world of podcasts and YouTube Red movies, The Gong Show created its own galaxy of stars who seemed perfectly suited to the format. Faded singer Jaye P. Morgan, Laugh-In weirdo Arte Johnson, perennial presidential hopeful Pat Paulsen. Oddest of all, bag-wearing speed-jokester The Unknown Comic, who became such a sensation he warranted his own Playgirl spread. Here he is with Rip on The $1.98 Beauty Show witnessing…some stuff.

Howard Stern would have no Wack Pack if not for Chuck Barris, and like so much of what made it onto The Gong Show, I can't decide whether that's good or bad.

Okay, Fine, Occasional Filth

Yeah, okay, I guess The Gong Show did get a little dirty sometimes. You still couldn't slip an act like this past the censors. Not even on FX.

Chuck Barris gave us a lot of stuff. Here's a whole episode of The Gong Show, and there are plenty more where it came from. Take yourself back to a world that was kinder, stranger and more hopeful, and know that Jaye P. Morgan would have gonged 80 percent of today's entertainers and all of our politicians.

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